My favorite story in Creative Confidence, the wonderful new book by design gurus Tom and David Kelley, describes a pottery class that was split in half and given one of two assignments.

Half the students were told they would be evaluated on the quality of a single clay pot due at the end of the class, while the other half were told they’d be evaluated by the volume of pottery generated – literally by the weight of their collective work. Not surprisingly, the students in the first group labored in intensively week after work to deliberately craft the finest piece they could, while students in the second group quickly threw pot after pot, week after week.

The remarkable observation, report the Kelleys, was that at the end of the class, “the best pieces all came from students whose goal was quantity, the ones who had spent the most time actually practicing their craft.”

The point of this story (originally from Art & Fear, by David Bayles and Ted Orland): act, iterate, get started — even when you don’t feel quite ready.

The Kelleys have spent their lives both thinking about and practicing creativity; David is the founder of the Stanford d.school and the legendary design firm IDEO; Tom is a former management consultant and a partner at IDEO. They wrote this book following David’s diagnosis, and subsequent recovery from, squamous cell cancer in 2007. In their words,

“As you look at the sweep of your life and start to think of a legacy that survives beyond it, giving others the opportunity to live up to their creative capacity seems like a worthy purpose. In the midst of David’s battle with cancer in 2007, the recurring question was ‘What was I put on Earth to do?’ This book is part of the answer: to reach out to as many people as possible. To give future innovators the opportunity to follow their passions. To help individuals and organizations unleash their full potential – and build their own creative confidence.”

In the Kelleys’ view, successful innovation involves three factors: business (the idea must be economically viable); technical (the idea must be feasible); and finally, people (the idea must effectively and empathetically speak to a human need). The Kelleys focus mostly on the third category, not because it’s more important, but rather because, they assert, it’s the most overlooked, the least taught, the most difficult to formally measure and evaluate – yet it’s absolutely essentially.

(I discuss design thinking and its implications for healthcare in Tech Tonics, as well as in thisAtlantic commentary; thisWSJ review of Little Bets may also be of interest, as well as this related In Vivo Blog discussion of the challenges and importance of rapid iteration in biopharma.)

The Kelleys believe thinking in a creative, people-focused fashion can be cultivated, taught, even mastered. Key principles include leveraging small successes, and having an incredibly high tolerance for failure. “If you want more success” they write, “you have to be to prepared to shrug off more failure.” There is a relentless emphasis on prototyping, iterating, getting user feedback early and often, optimizing continuously, reframing when necessary, and always with an empathetic focus on the people you’re trying to help.

Creativity requires “requires cycling a lot of ideas,” they emphasize. And the most important thing: to start.

Ankit Gupta, developer of the newsreader app Pulse (bought by LinkedIn earlier this year) captured the essence of the Kelleys’ idea when he observed “I learned that creativity is always in hindsight. It’s not about just coming up with one genius idea that solves the problem, but trying and failing at a hundred other solutions before arriving at the best one.”

The authors apply these principles in both a narrow sense – how to approach your job more creatively – as well as a broader sense – how to embrace a career that captures your passion, and enables you to “optimize for meaning, rather than for money.” They add, “Money will always be easier to measure, which is why it takes a little extra effort to value the heart.”

(The idea that the most important qualities are often those that are difficult or impossible to measure precisely is an important recurring theme of Creative Confidence, and a refreshing alternative to the relentless, reductive, and falsely-precise death-by-metrics mindset that seems to permeate so much decision making in technology, business and increasingly, healthcare.)

To be fair, some have critiqued the “follow your passion” message as disingenuous and misleading; Dilbert creator, Scott Adams, for examples, has articulately argued that passion may follow success, rather than anticipate it – i.e. we find ourselves enjoying the pursuits that make us successful, and lose interest in those that peter out.

Yet I think the Kelleys are speaking particularly to those who may feel “trapped by the curse of competence” – employees who perform their jobs well, yet get “no real fulfillment” from what they do, and are stuck in what the Kelleys call a “looks good, feels bad” job. “If you want to transform your life from mere duty to real passion,” they write,

“you have to start by realizing that your current situation is not the only option open to you… [T]hink about the overlap between your personal passions at the workplace options that might be available to you. Learn new skills. Start writing the new story of your working life. Keep searching for and moving towards a role that will feel as good as it looks. When you reach it, you may realize that you have found your calling.”

To be sure, Creative Confidence isn’t perfect; visibly, it has more than its fair share of tidy allegories, dropped names, and painful turns of phrase (“passport to new adventures”, “running shoes on,” etc).

Nevertheless, Creative Confidence is an empowering, compelling, relentlessly hopeful and optimistic read that brilliantly captures the Silicon Valley mindset in its most ennobling form.

(Disclosure: I’ve no personal or business connection with this book or the authors, whom I’ve never met.)

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